There has been explosive growth in Internet traffic due to the increased number of Internet users, various service demands from those users, the implementation of new services, such as voice-over-IP (VoIP) or streaming applications, and the development of mobile Internet. Conventional routers, which act as relaying nodes connected to sub-networks or other routers, have accomplished their roles well, in situations in which the time required to process packets, determine their destinations, and forward the packets to the destinations is usually smaller than the transmission time on network paths. More recently, however, the packet transmission capabilities of high-bandwidth network paths and the increases in Internet traffic have combined to outpace the processing capacities of conventional routers.
This has led to the development of a new generation of massively parallel, distributed architecture routers. A distributed architecture router typically comprises a large number of routing nodes that are coupled to each other via a plurality of switch fabric modules and an optional crossbar switch. Each routing node has its own routing (or forwarding) table for forwarding data packets via other routing nodes to a destination address.
It is advantageous to provide certain security and classification features in a router. Security and classification features may include i) simple security (anonymity), ii) firewall protection, iii) configuration independence, and iv) routing based on Layer 4 and CoS criteria, and the like. However, conventional routers often use a single threaded data plane and provide little or no security and classification features in the router core. Some conventional routers provide limited security and classification features, but require special-purpose classification engine hardware that can support data rates up to 1 Gbps but cannot operate at the required 10 Gbps data rates of newer routers. In addition, some routers provide limited security and classification features without a classification engine, but at data rates much less than 1 Gbps. Thus, the lack of security and classification features in current routers limit their usefulness as access points.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for improved high-speed routers. In particular, there is a need for a high-speed router capable of implementing security and classification features at data rates of 10 Gbps.